I thought at first that I also pronounce trap/bath differently, but now I'm not so sure; that may be the same vowel sound, or it may be subtly affected by the r, though that leading r doesn't have anywhere near the same effect as the following r in Mary/etc.

It's interesting that you might have a difference, and now I'm saying them to see if I have a similar r-shading effect going on with two sounds I thought were identical.
It's the 'trap' vs. 'baaaaaahth' division that is the big one here: instant north-south marker as well as, sadly, a still fairly-entrenched class one. Awkward if you're from almost the very place the country splits in two over the pronunciation (esp. compounded by being at the midpoint of the East/West Midlands dialect switch, being influenced by both but properly belonging to neither.)

I would say 'clerk' with an 'ar', but it's a fairly uncommon word (I would associate it more with courts than shops for instance, and the 'a' spelling predominates as a name) and all the other similarly-pronounced ones I can think of are place names. Derbs., Herts. and such.
And yet... although I know that it's the same for Berkshire, and is internally consistent and all, I cannot say Berkshire without the Berk. As in fool or custodian of the Trap Door. Attempting a Bahrkshire feels like I'm doing fake comedy posh, maybe because it's like trying to say 'bahth'. The rhyming slang must've got to me long before I was anywhere near Berkshire.

I donít know how much relevance this quote has since Iíve just scanned the thread, but I always liked this James Nicoll quote:

Quote:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Listening to the BBC this morning, one of the commentators pronounced the word lieutenant as left-tenant which I know is the British pronunciation of the word. Ten minutes later a second commentator pronounced it as lou-tenant. Are both pronunciations used in the UK? Is it a dialectic thing?

Listening to the BBC this morning, one of the commentators pronounced the word lieutenant as left-tenant which I know is the British pronunciation of the word. Ten minutes later a second commentator pronounced it as lou-tenant. Are both pronunciations used in the UK? Is it a dialectic thing?

Oh, these are dark times - times when BBC commentators may go about saying "lieutenant" with different pronunciations! Does not the BBC have standards any longer?

I think most people who aren't in the army would probably go with "lootenant" anyway these days. "Leftenant" sounds old-fashioned. There might be a generational divide; I'm not sure. It's not really the sort of word you have to say very much (unless you're in the army) and most of the times you hear it are in American films and TV programmes where it's pronounced "lootenant". Calling the film Bad Lieutenant "Bad Leftenant" is like calling Jay-Z "Jay Zed". Which means I do it, but it's as a joke, not seriously...

I do say "leftenant" myself when I think to do so, but it feels a bit pretentious, and if I wasn't thinking I'd probably say "lootenant".

The context isn't clear from your post, though, Beachlife. Is it possible that the first commentator was talking about a British army officer, and the second about an American one? That might lead them to use different pronunciations deliberately.

...
The context isn't clear from your post, though, Beachlife. Is it possible that the first commentator was talking about a British army officer, and the second about an American one? That might lead them to use different pronunciations deliberately.

It's possible, I wasn't fully paying attention, but I had assumed they were speaking of the same person.

The generational thing makes sense which is one of my guesses. I didn't think about the reference being to an American or a Brit. I thought it was strictly a pronunciation thing where one would always use one or the other.

While - as I said - I'm no expert, I also think the generation has a lot to do with it, but it does not look like the "f" pronunciation was ever universal in the UK. Wikipedia, citing the OED, says "The rare Old French variant spelling luef for Modern French lieu ('place') supports the suggestion that a final [u] of the Old French word was in certain environments perceived as an [f]", which at least appears to explain where the pronunciation came from.

I did a little searching and found the remnant of one of those users-answer-users-questions sites (from The Guardian, no less) where someone speculates the alternate pronunciation is from not wanting to sound too French, like pronouncing "Beauchamp" as "Beecham". Then again, someone else there said it was so we wouldn't think of lieutenants as tenants of the loo.